Anne took me out to dinner this evening at Captain Bills in Islip for my birthday. You know I know I'm not photogenic so I apologize for the picture (I am much more comfortable on the other side of the camera) but this is what 53 looks like.

 Finally got around watching the Apple keynote from yesterday, I'm particularly interested in the updates to dictation on both the iPhone and macOS. Since the pandemic I've been using dictation more and more both for my emails and when I'm writing long documents with whether it be a blog post, or site specifications partially because it tends to be faster than typing and partially because between my carpal tunnel syndrome and some cramping I've been getting in my hands for a while, it's far less painful to dictate rather than type. I guess I'm saving my hands for coding instead of just typing. I don't know what I'd wind up doing if I want to back to working in a shared office space, I'll have to drop off that bridge when I get to it.

Since I have the blog on my mind, I wonder if dictation makes creating posts easier when I'm out and about. I tend not to write from my phone only because of the small keyboard, I was never really comfortable with it. I can imagine though pulling up my phone hitting create a  post indicating something small when necessary.

Frosty had a followup appointment at the vet today after his TECA procedure.  After years of trying to handle his chronic ear infections, surgery to remove the ear canal was the only solution.  He's now deaf in his left ear, but should lead a better life.

I wonder why these animals love us.  Could you imagine being packed up in a box brought to a place where a doctor removes your canal leaving you deaf, spending the night in that unfamiliar place, coming home the next day and curling up next to the person who sent you to that place? It's not like you and I that have some reason I can't understand why things are being done all you know is this person who you love has brought you to a place to be tortured and damaged and yet you come home and you love on them.  It baffles my mind.

It's interesting the above post shows the some of the things that I missed tailoring my post to Facebook. The block quotes for the songs, the italics for the credits even the bold for the redacted information that I didn't want to post here on my blog.  It also shows some of what I am missing by not posting on Facebook. Since I can target my posts there to a certain population I can freely share a phone number or a deeplink.

Posted this on Facebook today:

First off, thank you all  for the birthday wishes, in spite of this post, they are truly appreciated.

I’ve been involved in one sort of online community or another since the late 80’s:  BBSes, usenet, IRC, MUDs, CompuServe, AOL, GeNie, forums, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Twitter, Pounce, Plurk,  Facebook, (I know I missed many),  What started off as exciting exploration in media hacking has devolved  into  proving you lead the perfect insta-life.  What used to be a pleasure has become a chore.  I could probably deal with all that but the algorithm constantly hides what’s important.  I’m more likely to find out what Star Wars character you are than the important developments in your life.  I have to hunt to find out about your new marriages, but am quickly inundated with what song is your perfect 80’s power ballad.

I’ve decided, at least for a while, to take a pause, reflect and enjoy the air around me.  I’ve been feeding the online beast for over 35 years I think I’ve earned a break.  So, for a time I won’t be paying attention to social media.

This is not you, this is truly online fatigue. I’m not closing my accounts,  I’m just going to leave them alone for a while, at least until I miss them.  I’ve already deleted the apps from my phone and am enjoying taking in the world around me instead of at my phone as I walk around.

I will long to meet you again.   My email is sean@seanreiser.com.  My personal number is REDACTED  it’s an iPhone so FaceTime and Blue Bubbles are there.  I promise not to discriminate if you’re a green bubble.  I plan on keeping Facebook Messenger open.  I’d love to see you in person, even if it’s a socially distanced conversation at the opposite ends of a 6 ft park bench under N95 masks.

If you want me to have your contact info, I set up this form a few months back feel free to fill it out: REDACTED .  If you don’t, I understand maybe we’ll meet at a con or bump into each other IRL.

I know this isn’t an airline and I don’t need to “announce my departure”,  but as I’ve been detaching more and more from social media, I wanted to let you know why.and how to find me if you desire.

I’ll probably be on in the next day or 3 to handle any comments from this post.  Please feel free to react / comment  to game the algorithm.

Expect me, when you see me,

sean.outAHere()

I just looked at the code for the TWIG template for the post contact type. My site is usually the first one I use when learning something new so when I move to Drupal 8,  this is one of the first TWIG templates I wrote and it shows. I'm going to take a deeper dive at this later in the week I think I'm going to desperately need to re-factor this template maybe even rebuild it from scratch.  On the plus side it's good to know that I can still learn things this is a good way to measure that. Improvement in progress are important.

Today I was reminded of one of the weaknesses of grouping posts by date using a Drupal. Posts are just going to be listed on any given day in reverse chronological order. So where I've had a number of posts about my birthday today add a couple of posts about this relaunch they're not being grouped logically. Also from an editorial control perspective I want the birthday post on the top of the page and the other posts logically grouped down the page. In the past  I'd change the time of the posts to put them in the order I'd want. It worked but it was inelegant. This time around instead of using a view to grab the posts I think I'm going to have a parent node, a day node for lack of a better description. This note would have three fields: a date, the title, and a node reference to collect the posts. Using the edit page, I can simply re-order posts as I want.

This gives me the added benefit that I can have a post appear on multiple days. In the past when I had to do this I'd  redate the post but I'd lose it off the original day it was posted. That might be useful.